SCHENECTADY â€¦ The two acts of “Giselle” are opposites in nearly every way.

Act I is playful and colorful, overflowing with the promise of love and the bounty of the harvest. Act II is like the gray morning after the party â€¦ a wintry purgatory with no hope in sight.

The St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre, under the direction of Yuri Petukhov, performed its version of the classic tragedy Saturday evening at Proctors Theatre.

While the company’s production is prettily costumed and adorned with picturesque sets and fresh-faced young dancers, “Giselle” fails to enchant. It’s no one’s fault in particular; the principals do what they can with the suprisingly bland material. The choreography by Jean Coralli, Jules Perrot and Marius Petipa lacks drama or variation, as does Adolphe Adam’s score. Like the lifeline of a stable but sedentary patient, it moves up and down but never approaches a crisis or convinces us of any real danger or emotion.

Alexandra Badina is almost excessively sprightly as Giselle, prancing and hopping about the stage. When she discovers her beloved Earl Albert is betrothed to another, she enacts the most polite death scene you ever saw, going mad and expiring without losing any of her good nature, and comes back in Act II as Giselle the friendly ghost.

In the role of Albert, who masquerades as a peasant to woo Giselle, Yury Mirov is tall, blond and just a little bit stiff. Both dancers rely on youthful energy rather than mastery of their art, cavorting like colts across the stage. The dancer with the most presence and virtuosity is Sergey Davydov, who plays the ill-fated Hans, a woodcutter who loves Giselle and exposes Albert as a nobleman.

The young lovers are rarely alone. In Act I, they are surrounded by an entourage of villagers, who perform an extended, lighthearted divertissement during the harvest festivities. In Act II, they are attended by a coterie of wraith-like “wilis” â€¦ young women who were betrayed by their lovers and died before their weddings. (There seems to be a rash of this sort of behavior, as there are more than a dozen wilis in this part of the forest alone.)

The wilis move with somber intention through their elegant though relatively simple choreography. In their grief, Albert and Giselle too appear to gain more gravity, particularly in a resigned pas de deux that pushes them apart as often as it brings them together. Giselle’s last earthly act is to save her beloved from death at the wilis’ hands (Hans is less lucky).

A betrayed woman, a lie exposed, a powerful man left to rue what he has lost â€¦ such is the timeless stuff of tragedy.

Tresca Weinstein, a local freelance writer, is a regular contributor to the Times Union.

ST. PETERSBURG BALLET THEATRE’S “GISELLE”
Where: Proctors Theatre, 432 State St., Schenectady
When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Length: 120 minutes, one intermission
The crowd: A enthusiastic but relatively small turnout of about 900, just over a third of the theater’s capacity